Subject:
travel advice; border security; housing affordability.
E&OE...
STEFANOVIC:
Good morning to you PM.
PRIME MINISTER:
Good morning.
STEFANOVIC:
How urgent, how serious are these threats in Indonesia?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well all terrorist threats are serious and the problem is if you don't warn of them and something happens you are legitimately criticised. On the other hand, they may not materialise, but we only give these warnings based on strong intelligence and there is intelligence about a possible JI attack in Indonesia and we have to give a warning.
WILKINSON:
Prime Minister it seems the police in Bali would beg to differ because they're talking down the advice saying that there is no specific intelligence of an attack?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well I can only tell you what our agencies tell us, we act on the advice of our agencies. We don't do it lightly. I spoke to the Foreign Minister about this yesterday, he went through all of the papers himself to be completely satisfied that upgrading the travel warning was justified. We are the last country in the world to want to say anything unnecessarily serious about Indonesia because Indonesia is a friendly country but we have above all of that a great obligation to warn our citizens if we think there is the possibility of something happening.
STEFANOVIC:
Probably not out of the ordinary that this person in Bali wouldn't know the specifics of international threats and possibly threats from within their own country, but a lot of Australians go to Bali for a holiday as you know, a lot of Australians work in Jakarta, what is the advice?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well they have to exercise caution, they have to stay away from places frequented by westerners; that's the advice that we give. In the end people will make their own judgements, but we have an obligation to reflect in our travel advisories the intelligence we receive. We can do no less than that. We're sorry we have to do it, but if we didn't do it, we'd be criticised, particularly if something went wrong.
WILKINSON:
Prime Minister, ASIO and the Immigration Department will now have software linked, that's almost well overdue isn't it?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well not well overdue because we are actually in advance of other countries in relation to this. We've been working on this since the end of last year and I have decided to fast track it for obvious reasons, so it's coming in a little earlier than might otherwise have been the normal course. We're putting aside other things to make sure it can come into operation in September. But it's very sophisticated software, it's very sophisticated technology and it really allows us to examine some of the antecedents other than just bare details of date of birth etcetera. And if a person's got a criminal record or associated with a terrorist organisation it allows us to examine other things that drill down into that person's background and that person's antecedents. I don't want to go into hypothetical examples, that probably might give some of the game away, but it will give us greater access to the background of people who are seeking to come to this country.
STEFANOVIC:
Do you concede therefore that until this point that those laws have been a little lax?
PRIME MINISTER:
No the laws haven't been lax. I mean this is not...
STEFANOVIC:
The checks?
PRIME MINISTER:
No well the checks haven't been; I mean you can't check what you don't have a capacity to check. And what's happened is that we have got some new software and we've been able of our own volition, and we are ahead of other countries on this; we've been able to upgrade and make more sophisticated our checks. I mean you know what it's like with IT. You're always being able to do more things, you're always being able to expand your capacity and clearly we've been working on an expansion of that capacity for some months and we're accelerating its introduction.
WILKINSON:
Would this kind of technology have stopped these doctors that are currently being questioned coming into the country?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well we don't know that they've done anything wrong yet, so...
WILKINSON:
But would it have stopped them?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well I can't even answer that hypothetically. I am pre-judging something and I am not going to do that. They are entitled to a presumption of innocence. They haven't been charged. They're in custody being questioned.
WILKINSON:
But there is enough there for them to be in custody?
PRIME MINISTER:
There is enough there for them to be detained for questioning. At this stage they have not been charged and not even hypothetically am I going to speculate as to what might have happened to them if a different situation had have obtained.
STEFANOVIC:
The point I guess is that you're not going to be able to stop them. A lot of these people come in and perform terrorist acts and that is their first thing against the law, perpetrated against anyone of any kind. So it's very difficult to weed them out isn't it?
PRIME MINISTER:
Yes but the great advantage of this new technology is that we will be able to examine their earlier behaviour in certain categories to determine whether that behaviour might predispose them to be a terror suspect. That is the difference. Sure, people may behave in a particular way which is not itself illegal or a terrorist act, but it may involve associations and activities which predispose you to think it could be terrorist behaviour. And what this new capacity will give us is an insight into that kind of behaviour and therefore will greatly enhance our capacity to deal with this problem.
WILKINSON:
Just quickly Prime Minister on another matter, Treasurer Peter Costello indicated yesterday that government land might be released to ease the housing affordability crisis. It really is a problem isn't it?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well the biggest problem is the cost of land. The cost of building a house has not gone up inordinately over the last 20 years but the cost of buying the package because the cost of land has gone up is a problem. And we're asking the states to join the Commonwealth in an audit of all available land, including our own because we do have some land, the states have a lot and they control land releases except Commonwealth-owned land and we hope they join us because this will help. There is no magical solution to this because people like the idea if they own a house that it's going up in value and we've got to be careful in the solutions we provide for this problem we've got to be careful we don't simply increase demand and make the houses more expensive. And if you give somebody $10,000 extra and they bid $10,000 more for the house they want to buy they're no further ahead are they?
WILKINSON:
Sure.
STEFANOVIC:
Could be soon though?
PRIME MINISTER:
What the audit? The audit, well there's no reason why the audit, if the states are responsive and I hope they will be on something like this because everyone has an interest on this, I hope it will be very, very soon.
STEFANOVIC:
Prime Minister, good to talk to you. Thanks for coming by.
PRIME MINISTER:
Thank you.
[ends]